France on a precipice as Le Pen aims for absolute majority in parliament

President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap parliamentary election in response to France’s extreme right’s victory in last month’s European elections was comparable to saying, “Let’s jump off the bridge to see if there is water in the river,” the French humorist Sophia Aram joked.

In the hours preceding Sunday night’s election results, France is on the parapet, preparing to jump. Fear of street violence is the most salient in a welter of emotions. Interior minister Gérald Darmanin is deploying an extra 30,000 police and gendarmes – 5,000 in Paris – “so that the ultra-left or the ultra-right cannot create disorder”.

Residents near the Place de la République are steeling themselves for trouble. Thousands of youthful protesters have gathered on the symbolic square most nights for a month, chanting “No Le Pen. No Fascists. No Macron.” They draped the statue of Marianne, symbol of France, in a multi-gender coloured vest. They dance and have covered the neighbourhood with graffiti. The protests have been noisy but good-natured – so far. Riot police in robocop paraphernalia, armed with tear gas and truncheons, have observed the nightly fete from the sidelines. Polls show that most security forces support the extreme right. Left-wing youths and right-wing cops are sizing each other up, spoiling for a fight. It could start on the Place de la République.

Darmanin said there were 51 attacks on candidates or militants during the campaign. A supporter of government spokeswoman Prisca Thevenot suffered a broken jaw when Thevenot’s team was attacked while putting up posters. Recent political violence has included the yellow vest protests, unrest over pension reform and an explosion of rage over the fatal shooting by police of an Arab youth last year.

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On June 24th, Macron accused the extreme right-wing National Rally (RN) of “promoting civil war” by classifying people according to origin and religion. He accused the far-left party France Unbowed (LFI) of “a form of sectarianism which also leads to civil war”. Civil war. The words have been spoken.

Marine Le Pen’s RN will win the largest number of seats on Sunday night; that is a certainty. The German tabloid Bild compared the situation to Hitler’s rise to power in 1932. The only question is whether the party, founded 51 years ago by a coterie of extreme right-wingers who included former Nazi collaborators and champions of l’Algérie française, will win an absolute majority of 289 or more seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, or a relative majority that will make it the largest party in the legislature, but with fewer than 50 per cent of seats.

[ Marine Le Pen warns France will come to standstill for a year if National Rally party fails to win absolute majority ]

If the RN wins an absolute majority, its 28-year-old leader Jordan Bardella will become prime minister. Le Pen says she will lead the RN’s group in the assembly while she campaigns for the 2027 presidential race.

Bardella can be expected to quickly enact RN policies that would turn 3.3 million dual nationals into second-class citizens, abolish the right to French nationality for children born in France of foreign parents, privatise public broadcasting and dramatically reduce France’s contribution to the European Union to help finance a massive cut to VAT on energy bills.

He says he will not take the prime minister’s job if the RN wins less than an absolute majority. His mentor, Le Pen, began to fudge on that stance this week, saying that if the RN is “within a few deputies” of an absolute majority, it will attempt to strike alliances with other parties. The neo-Gaullist Les Républicains, who have fragmented into pro-RN and anti-RN factions, are an obvious potential reservoir of support.

The RN won 7.7 million votes in the June 9th European election, then 10.6 million in the first round of the legislative election on June 30th. Nearly three million additional votes in three weeks. Le Pen’s party is on a roll.

The newfound confidence of RN supporters has unleashed a wave of racism, xenophobia and homophobia. A couple with RN signs on their house in Montargis screamed in front of television cameras at an African neighbour, a nurse, to “get back in your kennel”. An RN candidate in Burgundy said north African Arabs should not be allowed to serve as cabinet ministers. The human rights group SOS Racisme filed a lawsuit against an RN candidate in Alsace who claimed that Jean-Marie Le Pen’s assertion that the Holocaust was “a detail” of 20th-century history was not anti-Semitic. A gay man was beaten up by three far-right militants in Paris. When the RN comes to power, they told him, “We’ll be able to beat up as many homos as we want to.”

An RN candidate in Normandy pulled out of the race when photographs of her wearing a Nazi Luftwaffe cap were posted on social media. Another candidate wore a T-shirt for a rock band that plays Hitler Youth songs. Marine Le Pen said the offending candidates were “black sheep”. Bardella referred to “casting errors”.

The possibility of an absolute majority for the extreme right seemed to recede in midweek, after 224 non-RN candidates pulled out of three-way races, reducing the number of “triangulaire” contests from 306 to 82. (Three-way races favour the extreme right because they split the votes of its opponents.) An Ifop poll published on Friday predicted the RN would win between 210 and 240 seats.

Le Pen and Bardella reacted testily to the anti-RN candidates pulling out, amid talk of the restoration of the historical “republican front” that long hindered the rise of the extreme right. She accused anti-RN parties of seeking to instal a “one-party state”. Bardella called the tactical voting “an alliance of dishonour”. The perception by RN supporters that tactical voting has deprived the party of victory could become a pretext for political violence.

About two-thirds of the French electorate do not want to be governed by the RN, but their feckless leaders appear incapable of uniting against the RN to legislate or govern. Macron quickly poured cold water on hopes of an anti-RN government coalition, telling Wednesday’s cabinet meeting that his supporters pulling out of races to favour left-wing candidates “does not mean governing tomorrow with LFI”.

LFI’s support for the Palestinians of Gaza has been unfairly portrayed as anti-Semitic. The party, and especially its bombastic leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has been demonised since the Israel-Hamas war started on October 7th. It is nonetheless assured of coming in second on Sunday night, with a predicted 170-200 seats.

LFI is the largest component in the New Popular Front (NFP), the loose, left-wing alliance made up of centrist Socialists, Communists and Greens. Le Pen and Bardella have made the NFP their number-one target. “The extreme left poses an existential threat” to France, Bardella said. An Ipsos poll published on June 27th showed that 78 per cent of French people do not want Mélenchon to be prime minister, while only 55 per cent held unfavourable opinions of Le Pen. The NFP hurt its own chances of success by refusing to say who would be prime minister if it won a majority of seats.

Macron had 250 seats in the outgoing assembly, the largest number of any party. He will lose at least half of them in the new legislature. Le macronisme, the liberal, centrist, business-friendly, neither-left-nor-right, wishy-washy doctrine that has ruled France for the past seven years is dead. Macron says he will serve the remaining three years of his presidential term regardless.

Macron cannot call another legislative election for at least a year. A power struggle with Marine Le Pen has already started, with Le Pen accusing the president of attempting “an administrative coup d’état” by making numerous last-minute government appointments. She says Macron’s role as chief of the armed forces is purely “honorific”. Expect a constitutional crisis over presidential prerogatives.

Le Pen financed a past campaign with a Russian bank loan and recognised Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea. The RN’s delegation in the European Parliament refused to vote for a resolution condemning the attempted assassination of Alexei Navalny in 2020, and refused to condemn the depredations of the Wagner militia or Putin’s suppression of the human rights group Memorial. Tamara Volokhova, a Franco-Russian dual national with ties to Russian intelligence, is an adviser to the RN in the European Parliament.

“It is Macron who wants escalation in Ukraine,” Le Pen said this week. “It is Macron who talks about sending troops and long-range weapons. We will stop the escalation.”

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